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I grew up in England and was fortunate enough to be awarded a six-month internship at the Fisheries Laboratory in Lowestoft while an undergraduate. This was in 1971 when David Cushing was still the Director, and many famous fisheries scientists walked the halls, including Roy Harden Jones and John Pope. I participated in a juvenile fish survey aboard a small research vessel, which involved sampling along the south coast of England. We tied up in a different port each night and went ashore to sample the local beer. I liked the idea of doing this kind of work for a living!

I started working at SAFS (then the School of Fisheries) in 1979, seeking more stable income than the music profession afforded me. I was hired to do word processing—transcribing hand-written publications to digital files on 5-1/4” floppy disks (huh?!?) on a big, hulking, black machine that would shut down and wipe out the data if I looked at it askance; once, it even caught on fire. That wasn’t the only hazard: one time an intense storm literally blew the window to my office right off its hinges. Less dangerous, but more noxious, were the fumes coming from the basement when the food science crew were conducting their experiments. I remained undeterred by these minor hazards, as I soon came to realize SAFS was a great place to work.

It is a fitting time to write something about my time at SAFS because it has been forty-two years almost to the day since I started working at what was then called the School of Fisheries (hereafter I’ll refer to it as SAFS). I was hired by Charles “Si” Simenstad in October 1977 and started at the Big Beef Creek research station, sorting out and identifying salmon diets and invertebrate samples, part of impact studies of the new Trident submarine base on Hood Canal.

I was fortunate to be in elementary school when the Soviets sent up the Sputnik satellite in October, 1957. This galvanized the United States government, in addition to ramping up the US space program, to launch a variety of “new math” programs for students, including female students, a rather bold move in those days. Female students who were identified as having mathematical abilities were encouraged to pursue mathematics and other STEM fields, even without the legal backing of Title IX (which did not come into being until the 1970s).

My experience at SAFS in the 1990s was nothing short of magical. I returned to UW when my livelihood in Alaska—commercial fishing for halibut and sablefish—came under threat due to overcapitalization and severely reduced fishing seasons. I needed to diversify my talents and expand my capabilities by completing a bachelor’s degree.

“Having recently moved, we sometimes find ourselves asking ‘how did we end up living in Madrid?’ The answer lies in part in our professional and personal experiences gained at SAFS.”
“While at SAFS, I studied salmon hatchery/wild interactions and growth through the lens of quantitative genetics with Kerry Naish”, says Erin. “I was also a teaching assistant for the Conservation Genetics class for several years, which had a considerable impact on my continued interest in science education.”
Nathan was at SAFS as a post-doctoral fellow from 2006 to 2008.

Pam and Greg came to SAFS via two very different routes that converged on crabs. Pam grew up in Nevada and was a biology major at the University of Nevada Reno, with little idea of what she wanted to study in graduate school. Then, in an upper-level invertebrate biology class, the instructor had live marine invertebrates flown in. She was hooked and started looking for schools with marine programs.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
An excerpt from Sea Fever, a poem by John Masefield.

Evi, the first child of Swiss emigrants, was born and raised in Alaska, where fish and fishing were a way of life. She spent her summers commercial fishing for salmon with her family on the Susitna Flats (between the Susitna and Little Susitna Rivers), just west of Anchorage, using set gillnets, living in a cabin precariously perched atop stilts above the intertidal flats, which served as her family’s “field station.” Evi also worked in a salmon roe cannery, where she was particularly adept at layering the top “show row” of eggs.

Dawn and Brandon met at a Hilborn lab meeting when Brandon was reporting on a recent trip to the Serengeti. With a shared excitement for travel and unplanned adventure, they have spent the last ten years working and traveling together. After Dawn earned her MS degree with QERM, they moved from Seattle to Santa Barbara, where they worked with Chris Costello and Steve Gaines at the Sustainable Fisheries Group at UCSB.